Like symptoms of disease, visible threats to forests are often best treated by addressing their underlying causes. Behind the obvious activities endangering the world's frontier forests are a nest of interrelated root causes:

• Growing economies and consumption: Even in parts of the world where population is not growing significantly, demand for certain forest resources for both local and export markets is intensifying as economies expand. Between 1961 and 1994, per capita consumption of paper increased by 86 percent globally and by 350 percent in developing countries. (See "Example of Pressures on Forests: People are Using More Paper Products"). Industrialized countries still use more than 10 times as much paper per person than people in developing regions do. Global consumption of industrial wood products is expected to jump by more than 50 percent by 2010. (See Wood Consumption Projected to Increase by 56% by 2010.)

  

  

• Population growth and demand for new land: Just since 1950, the world's population has more than doubled. [33] As a result, in many regions, forests have been cleared to grow food and to make way for new settlements. Population growth also drives up demand for timber, paper, fuelwood, and other products from an ever-shrinking forest base.
• Bad economic policies: In weighing land-management options, economists and policy-makers often overlook the costs of losing frontier forest. Such costs may come in the form of soil erosion, the loss of water for agriculture, and release of carbon into the atmosphere. Lost opportunities should count too, including foregone income from ecotourism, "bio-prospecting", and other lucrative uses of whole and healthy forests. Even logging, mining and other exploitative uses often don't bring in the revenues they could: trying to attract foreign investors, many national governments all but give away valuable rights to exploit their forests. Such economic decisions are common because the costs of destruction are not felt or paid by those doing the damage. Frequently, governments and industry reap the profits while frontier peoples receive only a sliver of the benefits but bear the environmental brunt of forest mismanagement.
• Short-sighted political decisions: In much of the world, frontier forests are sacrificed for short-term political gain to appease interest groups or to line the pockets of politicians and their allies. In endangered U.S. and Canadian old-growth forests, for example, governments allow logging to provide questionable job security for a very small number of people who may soon be sidelined by technological and market changes within the industry anyway. In tropical countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Malaysia, decision-makers attack poverty by moving millions of people to the forest frontier, even though this approach is only a temporary fix for the poor and can permanently destroy the forests.
• Corruption and illegal trade: Corruption among officials in government, industry, and other organizations often hastens frontier forest loss. In Cambodia, for example, the military takes part in a thriving illegal timber trade with neighboring Thailand. [34] In Burma, the government and rebel groups have both financed a decades-long civil war with illegal logging proceeds. [35] In Alaska, Malaysia, Suriname, and elsewhere, timber companies have been accused of engaging in timber smuggling, trying to bribe government officials to procure lucrative concessions, and other illegal practices. [36][37] Even demand for illegal drugs fuels forest destruction: in Colombia, for example, clearings are carved out of remote frontier forests to grow coca, marijuana, and opium poppies. [38]
• Poverty and landlessness: In Brazil, Guatemala, and elsewhere, the poor flock to frontier forests in search of agricultural land and other economic opportunities. Rather than grapple with such politically thorny issues as land redistribution and tenure, governments often encourage the clearing of forest lands poorly suited to agriculture. In Brazil, for example, migrants have had to clear forest to establish land ownership, a "don't think twice" policy that spawned more deforestation and discouraged settlers from managing frontiers for their forest products. [39]

References and notes

33. World Resources Institute, World Resources 1996-97 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 190.

34. Global Witness, Corruption, War and Forest Policy: The Unsustainable Exploitation of Cambodia's Forests, (London: Global Witness Ltd., February 1996) p. 3.

35. 35. Kirk Talbott and Chantal Elkin, Logging Burma's Forests: Resources for the Regime, (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, forthcoming).

36. 36. Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Corporate Power, Corruption and the Destruction of the World's Forests: The Case for a New Global Forest Agreement, (Washington, D.C.: EIA, 1995), pp. 6-7.

37. Nigel Sizer and Richard Rice, Backs to the Wall in Suriname: Forest Policy in a Country in Crisis, (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, 1995), p. 11.

38. World Press Review, "Colombia's Vanishing Forests," World Press Review, Vol. 40, No. 6, June 1993, p. 34.

39. Nigel Smith, Paulo Alvim, Emanuel Serrao, and Italo Falesi, "Amazonia," in Regions at Risk: Comparisons of Threatened Environments, Jeanne Kasperson, Roger Kasperson and B. L. Turner II, eds., (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1995), pp. 58-9.